The Ogallala aquifer seems to be a very fine line we are walking. It supplies a lot (nearly 30% I believe) of groundwater for the U.S. and seems to be shrinking in size all the time (it's yield, as well, with the differences in discharge/recharge rates). These droughts we keep seeing in those areas are just adding to the uncertainty of how long the aquifer will be a reliable source of groundwater.

I'm working on drought as part of my Ph.D and from what I am seeing, the Ogallala aquifer is being drained at almost 6 times the replenishment rate...some authors are saying that in the next 5-7 years, large sections of the aquifer are going to dry up and agriculture in the area will suffer accordingly.

would not want to be in the agricultural industry in those areas when that occurs.

Oh I would. Indoor aquaponics uses less than a tenth of the water of dirt farming, doesn't need pesticides or herbicides, can grow year round, and produces between two and eight times the yield for the same amount of space and energy input. Oh and you get fish.

A week or two ago, a large scale aquaponic farm was shown off at r/gardening and it was impressive indeed. It can be complicated for sure but if you need to feed tons of people with ever decreasing space, this is the way. Imagine if people manage to stack the setups.

For my own personal use and enjoyment, I would stick with good old soil to grow my food(its for sure not a bad skill to have) but if I want to feed a nation or the world, aquaponics for sure.

I can build you a system to provide two people all the necessary food to sustain life for about 10k all said and done, but that's with all the bells and whistles, solar (+batteries), worms the works. And it's only that expensive because I don't build in volume, I'm sure an Ikea style kit could be much less expensive.

Were the real benefits come from though is they require very little maintenance, and grow food very fast. A couple of hours a week is all you need to keep it going, less effort than going shopping. Nothing wrong with dirt gardening, but it's not everyone's cup of tea, and not everyone has the time.

I'm trying to work out a system that be placed in an apartment using LED lighting to assist whatever natural light is available in the form factor of a large floor lamp, but the environment is hard to maintain at less that a hundred gallons.

Soil, not dirt. Dirt is such a terrible word... but yeah, I do see where you are coming from. I may take a whack at hydroponics when I get the space, money and time to do so. Especially so when considering that I heard of systems that integrate fishes. That is quite a bit of engineering and DIY (Which I love).

Check out my big post in this tread for some details. Otherwise google is your friend. Every system I have helped construct has been a one off project and there is lots of fiddling. I still just google around to get new ideas and review the basics when I forget (I really should write more shit down). Other people I work with are much more organized than I am.

A good starter level project starts with three, hundred gallon, Rubbermaid tubs. This is an easily sustainable volume. Other than that you need some bricks, PVC pipe, and a pump. Get some basic instructions from the net (they change and are updated all the time, the ones I have are all out of date) and fiddle until you come up with something that works.

/r/aquaponics! Its not just for industrial sized facilities, families can easily build and sustain their own variable sized aquaponics systems and provide plenty of produce. If you build indoors or climate controlled space, you can produce year round and there's no issue of soil depletion!

It could be you. The tech has been all but ignored by the big players meaning there is lot's and lot's of documentation on doing it yourself. The plumbing is super simple, though for a large installment you would want to get everything checked out by an expert, but anything less that 10K gallons and you shouldn't need any special training.

Some cool tricks to get you ahead of the game would be:

Use sea shells to balance your PH. As the PH rises the shells degrade faster lowering it, as it becomes low they stop degrading allowing it to rise again.

Three stage systems are the way to go, a gravel bed for root plants, a float bed for leafy plants, and a fish tank for the fish and water plants.

You are going to want to use a bell siphon, no moving parts, once you get it going correctly (can be a bitch) it just works, worth the effort, nothing to break.

A centrifugal waste separator, this is really just a bucket at the top of your system before it goes into the gravel bed that has fins to spin the water so solids gets trapped in the middle with a valve at the bottom to empty it periodically. Also means you don't have to clean it nearly as often.

A large source of worms to make fertilizer with. This is functionally identical to composting but you are optimizing for worm production.

Fermenting your solids + worms to create "worm tea", covers nearly all your federalizing needs and then some. That's right aquaponics makes more fertilizers than it consumes. Either sell the excess or use it on your dirt garden or orchard, better than Miracle-Gro.

Separate your fish tank into a full sized fish section and a fry section to manage the Tilapia population. Plus you can grow plants that the Tilapia like to eat in the fry portion without stressing them, meaning free fish food just scoop the plants from one side to the other as needed.

Populate your float beds with shell fish like crabs or crayfish or both to provide the Tilapia with protein and that covers their needs entirely.

Be sure to keep the O2 levels as high as your fish can tolerate to promote a pro-biotic environment. Good bacteria like oxygen, bad bacteria don't. Easiest way to do this is to punch holes in a the PVC pipe that dumps into your fish tank, instead of letting it pour out in a steady stream.

Learn to make colloidal iron, it's similar to making colloidal silver, and you don't have to buy iron fertilizer, and the plants seem to like it more.

That's about it, a system with all of the above, a water catchment system, and solar power is entirely self sustainable. A solar powered food factory, scalable from a 200 gallon system that can feed two people indefinitely, to a 2 million gallon fully automated, robotic, vertical farm that could feed an entire city year round centrally located without seasons or transportation to worry about, putting the food where the people are. With none of the drawbacks of dirt farming like disease, rot, weather, or having to manage every minute detail like hydroponics.

Funny thing I learned while writing a completion paper about the Dust Bowl as an undergrad years ago.

Gasoline powered water pumps for pumping the Ogallala aquifer didn't exist/have widespread use until AFTER the dust bowl drought ended. The region experiences a particularly harsh drought every 20 years. My idea in my paper was the widespread pumping of the Ogallala was the primary method by which future dust bowls have been prevented.

I'm still learning about the subjec, just started on the project a month ago, but my understanding so far is that siphoning of the aquifer does help prevent dust bowl like conditions and does help agriculture during low precipitation seasons. Minor droughts for a year or two can be recovered from with medium to low stress on the aquifer.
The problem comes when you have a long term drought on the order of 5+ years. Not to mention that Texas has met their increased water demands by expanding into and extracting more from the aquifer rather than practice better methods of conservation through decreasing public consumption via education or more stringent water laws.

Long term droughts in Texas occur with some regularity about once every 20 years. The true disaster will not occur for another 20 years when the aquifer is depleted and west Texas towns literally dry up and disappear.

The biggest towns in Texas which will shrink dramatically are Lubbock and Amarillo. Without agriculture those towns will die.

It will dry up eventually, no question, but I want to point out that 12 years ago I read a report saying the Ogallala would be dry in 10 years. Unfortunately we don't know how much water it has, only that it isn't being replenished.

In class, we actually talked about that idea, but I believe my professor said that Canada will not allow us to take water from the Great Lakes and distribute it to our areas that are short on water. I personally live in northern Ohio, so we got Lake Erie's watershed to supply us =D

I'm a ecology student from the hill country and this issue has me fuming. "oh we are running out of water?" "well i don't like that version of the truth" how about "there will always be enough water for everyone to use"..."it worked out well for oil"

There are some places in west Texas I know of , In the Abilene area where they have to use tanks of water for there homes because the wells have dried up. I know in my town we are in a stage 2 water restriction for the last 2 years for the same reason.

I seem to recall that happening to a town near here (central Tx) within the past few months also. Luckily it's been raining here and there recently, though it might not be much, and certainly isn't enough, it's probably more than we've received over the past two years put together.
It's getting to be ridiculous

You might need it to be faster than that since it wouldnt be as humid. Pumping warm air through a cooling system can extract the humidity from the air (basicly why an air conditioner dries the air coming through it). You might be able to modify an old freezer into doing it.

Your proposing pumping over the Continental divide. Your talking massive infrastructure costs and we spend it all on military rather than that. Also it would be cheaper to pump the Mississippi river over and your end to pump to California, Nevada and Arizona.

Lastly as a former Native Texan too many have transported themselves to Texas. The area is basically a desert with prairie grass in the west and reduced forest in the far east. Places like Dallas, Ft. Worth, Austin and further west the land was never capable of sustaining such massive population. Most these areas would not even have grown if LBJ had not had a massive infrastructure of dam laden lakes along the major 5 rivers that flow through these areas providing water, but destroyed the original watershed.

No, and as a Washingtonian if Texas where to request something like that I myself would tell them to go fuck themselves. Texas seems to think of itself as a "whole other country" and the idea of secession is rather high there compared to most other states.

This makes me wonder how much danger there is of aquifer collapse. Parts of the San Joaquin Valley in California have subsided about 10 meters in the last century or so of groundwater irrigation. From what I've read, aquifers are honeycombed structures that are held together to a large extent by the pressure of the water they contain. Remove the water, and the walls collapse.

At that point, even if the society aboveground institutes sane water policy, it's too late for the aquifers-- they'll never recharge to hold as much water as they did before they collapsed. I know this is a big problem in California, but I also know that the structure of the earth varies widely from region to region. I'd be very interested to know whether this is an issue of regional geology, or if it can happen anywhere groundwater is depleted.

It's common to run political boundaries on geographic boundaries, often including watershed drainage divides. Where there are onshore prevailing winds the seaward side of a divide will be much wetter than the landward side.

Some places on the island are starting to have dry wells during the summer. I know somebody (anecdotal, I know) NW of Courtney who runs out of water in July and relies on tanks until late September when it rains again.

seriously guys you can have some water from us, we have more than enough, so much in fact that the companies controlling the water have not created any new standby dams in many many years, so when we have even a low rainfall year water runs and we are not allowed to use hosepipes. If we had two or three hot summers we would have a calamity on our hands and we are known as the wettest country in the world...well almost.
This is what happens when you allow businesses to run the water supply for profit.

Isn't this another argument in favour of agroforestry? Forests seem to influence local climates to maintain water better, and increase the amount rain (something to do with both heat absorption and chemicals released by trees).

I have an idea...lets all move from California to Texas because its cheaper...and hey guess what? They are 98% privately owned land...so we can do what every the fuck we want.....city water? fuck it! lets just drill this high density subdivision into the Trinity..but they already use 72% of their available water each year!....I don't give a fuck, by the time anything happens we will have profited and moved on.

I was just thinking the same thing. Those maps have New England as looking pretty dry, and yet all of the area corn fields and gardens that I've seen have done quite well this summer. (One family I know has more cherry tomatoes and various chili peppers than they know what to do with...)

The only thing I can figure is that the map represents what is normal for a given region. I just moved from Charlottesville, VA, where it's pretty much green as far as the eye can see, to Reno, NV, where it's semi-desert. VA is in the red and NV is predominantly white.

I find it interesting that the maps show the Lakeview area of Oregon as ground water depleted, an area that has a system of large lakes. It also shows the Crane area south of Burns, Oregon as low in surface moisture and soil moisture when that area captures the Sylvies river and the Donner-and-Blitzen river drainage, plus also has large surface lakes and marshes. I call into question the accuracy of these maps because of this.

Can someone with more knows than me please explain how northwest Florida could be in the red for root-zone moisture when it has rained here 6 days out of the week all summer long? I seriously can't remember a wetter summer in my entire life.

Rains on the food supply and consumed by humans then put in sewers and pushed out to the ocean. Then the ocean wind currents have altered based on warming/cooling of the water and then pushes it to regions like my part of the island. There it's dumping all day and all night long which doesn't normally occur.